December 2008 Archives

There’s still time to get a copy of The Wine Snob’s Dictionary (nicely written up in USA Today) as a last-minute holiday gift. But at Snob HQ we’re looking to the future. Having exposed the snobby underbellies of Rock, Film, Food, and Wine, we’re contemplating applying the template to sports (e.g. “The Pro Football Snob’s Dictionary,” short versions of which actually appeared in Vanity Fair in 2004 and 2005) and/or race, religion, and ethnicity (e.g., the as-yet-unwritten “Black Snob’s Dictionary,” “Jewish Snob’s Dictionary” and “Irish-American Snob’s Dictionary”). In every area of cultural and social inquiry, there is a deep seam of snobbery that is waiting to be tapped and exploited.

Let us know what you’d like to read next, including Snob’s Dictionaries not proposed above.

Film Snobbery

Food Snobbery

Wine Snobbery

Anime. Catchall term for Japanese or Japanese-style animation, an understanding of which is said by Snobs to be crucial to understanding the future of cinema (yea, of our very culture!), since it, like CHOP-SOCKY, will inform all filmmaking visionaries worth a damn—even though it reliably focuses on species-nonspecific furry animals and childlike humanoids with enormous, saucery eyes. A societal subculture as much as it is a genre, anime takes many forms, including merchandise-shifting product (Pokémon), lyrical children’s fare (the films of Hayao Miyazaki), and explicit pornography (the subgenre known as hentai, in which the childlike humanoids have enormous, R. Crumb–inspired bosoms to go with their enormous, saucery eyes). Anime has established an American beachhead with the Chicago-based Manga Entertainment (manga is the Japanese word for “comics”), the distributor behind the cult hits Ghost in the Shell and Blood: The Last Vampire.